The Javamex companion blog. This blog includes both technical articles relating to the programming information that you'll find on the Javamex site, plus information covering the IT industry more generally.

Saturday, August 16, 2014

Horses for courses: Stroustrup's InfoWorld interview

In a recent interview for InfoWorld, C++ creator Bjarne Stroustrup talks about why he believes C++ is still going strong in 2014. To me, two statements of his argument stand out:

he attributes the popularity partly to the fact that "nothing that can handle complexity runs as fast as C++";

he acknowledges that "C++ is designed for fairly hardcore applications" and that it can be part of a mix of different languages (he mentions the fact that he himself uses C++ along with a scripting language such as Unix shell script).

Taken together, these points are broadly fair. What I do wonder, however, is to what extent he is characterising as intrinsic language features what arguably are more compiler features than language features. And inasmuch as C++ forces you to as a programmer to get a little "nearer the metal" than a language such as Java, to some extent it does so because it is based on C rather than because of the object orientation and other features added in C++.

It's also fair to say that not all uses of C++ historically have been for "fairly hardcore" applications and that, as at least one commentator on the site has pointed out, some of the popularity of C++ is surely attributable to the fact that, once a large-scale application is written in one system, it's difficult to find the momentum to shift to a whole new language or development system.

All in all, though, the interview does go to highlight that language wars are largely futile. Languages like Java have a strong footing in their specific domain. And C++ does in its domain. What is more important is to focus on the right tool for the job.